Tuesday, February 08, 2005

um, what was infamous about Apple's '1984' ad? does anybody know?

"The Super Bowl and its ads are the most widely-watched television event of the year. But paying top dollar to hawk products during the game doesn't guarantee a sales boost. On the one hand, Apple Computer's infamous '1984' ad nearly two decades ago helped generate $4.5 million in sales within six hours of its broadcast, according to Bernice Kanner's 'The Super Bowl of Advertising: How the Commercials Won the Game.' "

10 comments:

Anonymous
said...

i think it's infamous because...it generated so much money directly. everyone's been trying to copy since. (and "infamous" not "famous" because cnn is a card-carrying member of the anti-capitalist liberal media?)

well the whole orwellian tone and the tagline "why 1984 won't be like 1984" and the sledge hammer bashing "big brother" (bill gates) was pretty memorable. i also remember hearing that it made such an impression that tv news showed it after the superbowl giving it even more airtime.

The following text from http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=1984might shed some light on its imfamousness. I've never seen the whole thing before now. It's a pretty cool commercial, actually.

"The scholar Jim Twitchell examined this ad in his worthwhile Twenty Ads that Shook the World, noting quite rightly that Scott's dystopian world is right out of 1920s German expressionist film by directors like Murnau and Lang. He also cogently notes that the Macintosh has as its representative a woman--indeed, one flaunting her secondary sexual characteristics--whereas the drones are either androgynous or male (many of their heads are shaven, and a few have respirator masks over their faces). Big bad old IBM is a bunch of men, and in male fashion impose their rigid logic on you; Apple has flexible, iconoclastic, intuitive power on its side.

The ad did terribly when screened by test audiences, and Apple evidently wanted to axe it (the ad cost $400,000, and the superbowl time cost half a million dollars). Twitchell relates that when the board of directors were about to can the commercial, Woz turned to Jobs and said "I'll pay for half if you pay for the other half." And so the commercial ran."